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| Casey and I strolling on a San Francisco beach, March, 2003. |
I had one of my very odd dreams a couple years ago. In it I met a person and, to find out more about them, went to a nondescript library and pulled a thick book off the shelf to read their biography. I would love to be able to do that to find out more about the life of my mother or father, to discover the years I don't know about in my best friends' lives, to understand any individual's personal thoughts and feelings about being them. That's really my motivation for writing these personal essays. I want to add my book to the shelf of life.
In writing many personal essays, I've discovered that I remember a lot more about my life than I'd thought possible. These essays evoked hundreds, if not thousands, of memories. When I combine them with a daily diary that covers my life since 1978, there has been no shortage of subjects and ideas. For years I thought about taking on this project, but the opportunity only came after I retired in 2015.
Where the original set of personal essays primarily focused on events, experiences, and other people from my life, I've written some very personal snapshots to describe who I am. If you take all of the writings together, these snapshots serve as interludes between the original essays, much as the main theme melody in Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition serves, as you stroll from one gallery to the next.
Let's see what's in this room....
I retired on July 1, 2015, exactly 42 years from the day I began my first full-time job at the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign, Illinois. For years I had wondered what would drive me to retirement. Would I be overworked or bored? Would my company fold and leave me jobless? Would I move away from the Bay Area and not be able to see my clients? Would I just get too old?
As it turned out, I retired because of health reasons. I had blacked out on April 28, 2013, while riding a stationary exercise bike and sustained a concussion when I crashed to the floor. Unlike Sheryl Sandberg's husband after such an incident, I survived the fall. It took several months to really recover from the concussion. By the time I was at full-strength again, I noticed a deep ache in my neck, and then it became debilitating. In mid-October of that year, it suddenly grew worse, along with the advent of loud tinnitus, oddly different in the two ears.
Over the next 18 months, I went to 117 office visits of doctors, therapists, and diagnosticians. Through two MRI's and an MRA, it was confirmed that I had stenosis and disc degeneration in three vertebrae in my neck. One neurosurgeon wanted to operate immediately, but a second neurosurgeon said I was far from needing surgery, that there were other remedies to try. I went to a physiatrist (pain doctor), and he refused to treat me, because he said the results would only last a few days.
Finally I was sent to my fourth physical therapist, who was a doctor of physical therapy. Both she and her father have chronic neck pain, she said. She looked at my MRI, inspected my neck with her hands, and uttered the unforgettable words, "Well, your neck is not as bad as the MRI shows. We can fix a lot of what's giving you pain. The main problem is in the muscles of your upper back." Slowly we worked up a regimen of neck exercises, many of which were different from exercises I'd already tried, and slowly the pain eased.
During this time, though, I realized I could no longer make it through an eight-hour work day (six hours was my limit), so I gave my notice in late spring, 2015, of my imminent retirement. I could not sit at my desk longer than a couple hours at a time without my neck aching terribly. This affected my concentration and even motor control, and I realized that my clients weren't getting the expertise, care, and efficiency of the old Steve Cowan. At Quartet Systems, we mostly worked alone (from our homes) and often worked on technical issues that required an intense focus and clarity. I couldn't muster that focus for the necessary periods of time to solve some of the typical technical issues, so I knew I had to retire.
I gave three months' notice, slowly transferred my responsibilities to other people in the company, and had a wonderful final month. During that time I privately worked on a list of things I wanted to do after I put down my slide rule (figuratively) and set aside my database management skills (literally). I came up with ten things that would occupy my time after I retired.
One of them was to start writing blogs--personal essays. My first set of articles would be entitled Meetings With Remarkable People, patterned after one of my all-time favorite books, Meetings With Remarkable Men, by G. I. Gurdjieff. Writing those articles was a project I had mulled for the 35 years since I had read the book. It was time to write them.
During
the next eight months I wrote the thirteen articles (including an
introduction) about the remarkable people on my list. Each article took
an amazing amount of research to get dates and events correct, and it
was immensely fulfilling. During that time I also wrote three or four
opinion pieces, like my July, 2015, analysis of why Hillary Clinton
would lose to the Republican candidate, whoever that might be. When I
finished with the remarkable people series, I kept writing personal
essays. By then I had so many ideas that I just couldn't stop. I have
written hundreds of pages of personal essays since then.
My primary focus in writing these personal essays has been my relationships with other people, but a great deal of autobiographical information has gone into all of the pieces. My favorites have been An Introduction To Songwriting, Collaborations, Life In The Middle Lane, Mom and Dad, and Twelve Stories. I also really liked writing Best Friends, because I got to describe the people (outside of my family) I've been closest to. The hardest to write were Belief, The Limits of Empathy, and Defining Racism in My Life. Cody and Sue were bittersweet, while A Magical Mystery Tour, Seven Days in Greenwich Village, and The Lamp were just plain fun.
While writing These Useless Emotions, I began thinking about the impossibility of really knowing another person. We never quite know how it is to be inside someone, to feel and think and act and understand things as they do. Very early in my attempts to write personal essays, I came up with a title for the combined works--A Common Uncommon Life. I have had a very interesting (to me), filled, uncommon life, mostly because I didn't spend a lot of time raising children. I was a stepparent for four years, but the kids were old enough that they didn't require or want my complete attention.
There are all sorts of pros and cons for having your own children. My chagrin at not having my own children turned into pure joy at having two wonderful stepkids--Heather and Hal. If you think about it, you probably average three hours a day to care for a child, from infancy through the age of eighteen, that's 20,000 hours of your life! Some would say that you average a lot more than that over the course of eighteen years with one child, and multiple children would certainly require much more time. Two children might require 30,000 hours of your life. As circumstances worked out, I spent most of those 30,000 hours doing other things.
My stepdaughter, Heather, once said to me, "Wow, you've done so many unusual things in your life!" From that one comment, I began to think about what an uncommon life I've had, but I also realized that an uncommon life is rather common. I've known quite a few people who have led uncommon lives, so many that I can only say I've had a common uncommon life.
These interludes are self-centered, self-serving, and selfish, for they're all about me. What's it like to live inside me? You certainly may already be aware of these revelations; they may simply be a means of confirming what you know. But you may find some surprises.
Numbers and Dates
From a very early age I was completely enthralled by numbers and dates--anniversaries, birthdays, and the passage of time. As I describe in my Mom and Dad essay, dad taught me shortcuts in math when I was very young. My favorite gifts when I was a child were baseball magazines with statistics and puzzle books. Any puzzle with numbers immediately captivated me.
Most of my friends know and remark about my ability to remember dates. It is more often a comment of exaggerated kidding than praise, but I know it's meant in good spirit. If someone mentions an event we shared, I'll often remember the month and year.
I have kept a daily diary since 1978, using the Sierra
Club weekly calendars that are issued each year. The first thing I do
when I reach my office each morning is to write down the things I
remember from the day before, no matter how mundane they are. Often I
look up (in one of my many saved calendars) what I was doing 20 years ago
or 30 years ago. It is absolutely amazing how often I remember several
things that happened during a particular week long ago, once I look at
the old calendar. I've also saved 25 years of work calendars,
which document my client and programming activities down to 15-minute
intervals. It's fun to look back over what I did so many years ago.
I'm continually in awe of what is stored in the brain, if you go in
search of those memories.
Numbers are magical. Numbers are
special to me. I used to think up all sorts of games and pastimes
involving numbers. My sister and I would memorize player statistics off
the backs of baseball cards. As a child of 11 or 12, I decided to
count as high as I could until I got tired of counting, so I lay in bed
each night and continued from where I'd ended the previous night. I got
to 32,000 and stopped. Just sit quietly and try to count up to 1,000;
it's not that easy. Counting things seemed absolutely normal to me.
An
oddity of sorts revealed itself in second grade, when the teacher
paired me and Randy Smith in an addition contest in front of our
classmates. She would hold up flashcards, and we'd say the answer to an
addition problem as quickly as we could. We were the two best math
students, and I knew I was better than he was, but I always lost the
contest. It wasn't until sixth grade it was determined I needed glasses
and until high school I realized I was somewhat dyslexic. Both
conditions had contributed to my slowness in reading those flashcards.
It always bothered me that I'd lost those contests; I wasn't slower at
adding, but slower in reading.
Math was so easy for me that I
was bored most of the time. While fellow students were learning long
division and fractions, I was playing with magic squares and doing
square roots of large numbers by hand. I figured out that all numbers
whose digits add up to a multiple of 9 are themselves divisible by 9.
(Let's take a random number like 90345672. I guarantee it's divisible
by 9, because its digits add up to 36, which is divisible by 9.) I
couldn't get enough of numbers. When I took the advanced Algebra class
in eighth grade, where I could go at my own pace and take exams
independently of others, I finished the 18-week course in 12 weeks, two
weeks ahead of anyone else. The teacher just left me alone, to my
delight.
I went up through Calculus in high school and never
had a single "B" grade. My favorite class was Probability and
Statistics in eleventh grade, because it opened a whole new field of
numbers for me. At the end of the semester, our teacher announced, when
she returned the results of our final exam to the class, that I was the
first student in her long career who had gotten a perfect score. She
was amazed and a little disappointed, because she had worked hard to
find something wrong with it! There are many things I learned in that
class about permutations and combinations that I still carry with me and
use without thinking. If I walk into a room with 13 people (including
me), before even noting who they are, I'll usually think, "Ah, 78
handshakes." (If everyone shook hands with everyone else, that's 13
times 12 divided by 2.) After the number of handshakes flashes in my
mind, I notice who the people are.
Numbers didn't start to be a
challenge for me until I hit Abstract Algebra in college. Differential equations were a breeze before that, although I began wondering if I'd
ever use that stuff. As it turned out, we used differential equations
in the scientific programming I did in my first job, but they weren't as
fun as Geometry and Trigonometry and Calculus and Probability. (Course
names are capitalized!)
If you've read any of my personal
essays, you may have noticed how often I mention numbers in identifying
quantities of things. It's difficult for me to say "lots of" or "many"
when I can say I've read 34 books this year or played 14 rounds of golf
(both true, as of this writing). I truly like to count things, and it's
a habit I neither can nor want to change. When I walk around our
townhouse complex, I often count the number of driveways with two cars
in them or the number of people walking dogs. I try not to repeat a
recipe in less than ten weeks. I know how many episodes of "Morse" (33)
and "The Durrells In Corfu" (26) were made. I feel more relaxed, yet
alert when I count things. Numbers are a comfort to me.
Although
I majored in math at University of Illinois, I never wanted to be a
mathematician or college math professor. What really interested me,
once I had a firm basis of number theory, was logic. That's what I
really love about numbers: they are logical!
Puzzles, Games, and Mysteries
Hand-in-hand with loving numbers is my love of puzzles, logic games, and mysteries. If you give me a logic problem to solve, I'm in seventh heaven. Unlike many kids in school, I loved to solve the "story problems" we were given, no matter what type of math or logic was needed. My dad taught me how to do cryptograms before I was ten years old; the best gift from him was a new puzzle book. My sister and I learned to play chess when we were very young, and that was a type of logic puzzle that required strategy and knowledge and a competitive spirit.
In 1980, I began to do weekend crossword puzzles with friends. The smaller weekday crosswords did not interest me, because they usually didn't carry a theme and/or were not very difficult. On Saturdays we'd do the previous Sunday's New York Times crossword published in the San Francisco Chronicle, and on Sundays I'd work alone on Merl Reagle's crossword in the Chronicle. All of these weekend puzzles were 21x21 or 23x23 squares, and they were all designed to be tough. At first I'd use a dictionary and write my answers in pencil, but both of those habits were soon discarded. By 1982 I was working alone on all weekend puzzles, so I stopped using a dictionary and began using a pen.
To this day I still work on the Saturday Chronicle's reprint of the previous Sunday's New York Times puzzle, and I've gotten pretty good at them. It took me about eight years to finish my first Times puzzle without an error, but now I finish them on a regular basis. My personal challenge now is to finish a puzzle without making a single correction, which I do four or five times a year. The New York Times has a very high standard for puzzle clues--lots of ambiguity and wit, but always fair. I feel deprived if I miss the opportunity to work on the Times' Sunday puzzle.
The New York Times crossword editor, Will Shortz, is one
of my all-time heroes. Many of the clues are brilliant, which makes
the puzzle challenging and fun. I think it was Merl Reagle of the
Chronicle, though, who wrote my absolute favorite (and most macabre)
clue, "Boy in Saigon." Answer: euthanasia. You may not be able to
understand my thrill in solving that one.
I read mysteries when I was a kid, and I loved them. We read all the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books available. We'd eagerly await the release of the next book in the canon, and our neighborhood bookstore and thrift shop would save copies for us. Then when I was twelve years old, my Uncle Larry gave me The Complete Sherlock Holmes. It is a huge, hard-cover volume filled with very small print, and it includes all 4 novels and 56 short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I read every word of it.
Thus began my life-long love of
mysteries. The Hardy Boys books provided adventures, clues, and the
concept of "chums" solving puzzles. The Sherlock Holmes stories exposed
me to English mysteries, filled with atmosphere, etiquette, and
devilish stories. Holmes was the first, and perhaps only, detective to
be a master at both deductive and inductive reasoning, and I fell in
love with such diametric logic long before it was explained to me in
math classes.
When I was a teenager, I graduated to the Perry Mason paperbacks my dad would finish and pass along to me. They were wholesome, complex, and easy to read, stressing courtroom dialogue rather than the atmospheric descriptive passages in books I'd read before. And the mysteries were really, really good. As a 14-year-old, reading a 200-page novel was not common among my friends, but I devoured them, at my relatively slow reading speed.
I stopped reading mysteries when I went to college. For the next twenty years, I focused on plays and novels considered "classics." I was an English minor simply because I loved reading; I never thought about becoming an English scholar or serious writer. Hemingway, Kafka, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pinter, Ibsen, Shaw, O'Neill, Crane, Mann, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Flaubert, and dozens of others attracted me. It wasn't until the late 1980's, when seeing a counselor about relationship problems I was having, that I returned to reading mysteries. Gayle Montgomery, who I describe in one of my Meetings With Remarkable People essays, suggested that I spend a small portion of my time distracted by mysteries, since she was an avid mystery reader. Her first suggestion was to read The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers. I didn't know it is considered one of the five greatest mysteries ever written.
I was hooked. Reading mysteries not only provided countless hours of entertainment and appropriate distraction, but it reignited my deep love for "story problem" puzzles. She introduced me to Arthur Upfield's "Bony" series, to Agatha Christie and P. D. James and Patricia Moyes, and especially to Tony Hillerman's "Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee" Navajo mysteries.
It is hard to describe the nature of my addiction to reading mysteries, except to say that it's based on solving puzzles, setting my imagination to wander outside the "locked room" box. From reading the immensely entertaining "The Floating Admiral" mystery early in the 1990's, I realized that a mystery can have any number of solutions, depending on where the author wants to take us. (Each chapter in that book is written by a different mystery writer, with a writer only knowing about previous chapters, not succeeding ones. Then each writer offers the solution they would have written. Great fun!)
Although trying to match wits with a mystery writer is enjoyable, that's not why I read mysteries. I enjoy the art of writing and the puzzles equally. My favorite mystery writers--Laurie King, Louise Penny, Josephine Tey, Arthur Upfield, Tony Hillerman, Georges Simenon, Bruce Alexander, Patricia Moyes, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Colin Dexter--all would have been great writers had they not written mysteries. In addition to creating excellent characters, settings, and descriptions, they also provided puzzles that have occupied my mind for over thirty years. As Doyle wrote, "The game's afoot!"
Art
What would life be like without art and music? It's hard to imagine. Along with reading, art and music became the "triple helix" of my life when I was young. Although music and reading have been very important to me since I was a kid, my interest in art originated in my early twenties and flourished after I moved to California at the age of twenty-six. Art, music, and reading have intertwined for over 50 years.
My first three girlfriends were artists, as were many of my women friends. I began to love art by learning about artists that they loved. When I visited the Art Institute of Chicago to see exhibitions of Hopper, Homer, Monet, and Renoir, I just couldn't resist buying posters of my favorite works. Even though I developed a dear love for the Impressionists, I was also drawn to works by Dufy, Seurat, Van Gogh, Turner, and Rembrandt.
Almost from the beginning of my art
awareness,
Claude Monet was my favorite artist. I've seen his paintings in a dozen
different art museums, and I always thrill at the technique and beauty
in his work. Only a couple days after seeing 96 of his paintings in a
special exhibition at the Art Institute, I saw five more of his
paintings in New York City in 1975. For a long time I thought I was the
only person who had ever seen more than 100 of his paintings in one
week, but then my wife and I went to Paris in 2007 and saw his paintings
in five different galleries, certainly numbering more than 100
paintings. Our
favorite gallery was the Musee Marmottan Monet, where over
50 of his works hang, including the painting that inspired the
movement's name: Impression, Sunrise. The highlight of our
12-day trip to Paris was wandering around his Giverny estate. I took
this photo from Monet's bedroom window. Can you imagine waking up to
this view each April morning? The photo almost looks like an
Impressionist painting by itself!
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| A view of Monet's garden from his bedroom window! |
You
would never guess my second and third favorite artists. They are
Gustave Caillebotte and Gary Bukovnik. Gustave Caillebotte, an
Impressionist painter who used more elements of realism in his works
than other Impressionists did, first came to my attention when I rounded a
corner at an exhibition and encountered his famous painting, The Floor Scrapers,
which is 40"x57" in size. At first I thought it was a photograph and
then
realized it was the most incredible painting I'd ever seen. The realism
is stunning. Since that encounter I've also seen the painting with Suzanne at
the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, which is the painting's permanent home.
Although he did not
paint as many well-known pieces as Monet, Caillebotte's subject variety
is truly incredible, if you delve into his works. I love the detail and
geometry in this painting.
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| Caillebotte's The Floor Scrapers at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Photo taken in 2007. |
When I fell in love with this painting and Caillebotte’s work, I found that my appreciation of art had expanded. No longer did an artist have to be a stalwart of the Impressionist movement to qualify as a great painter to me. That’s when I first started looking at a wider landscape of paintings, such as works by Edward Hopper (Nighthawks) and Johannes Vermeer (Girl With A Pearl Earring) and Winslow Homer (Snap The Whip) and William Bouguereau (The Broken Pitcher). I began going to as many art exhibits and galleries as I could find.
That’s how I found my third favorite painter, Gary Bukovnik. In the 1980's, he began donating a floral-themed watercolor to the San Francisco Symphony each year for their annual poster, and I began buying them about 1990. That tradition continued for over 30 years, and we have since bought and framed 16 of those posters and hung them in our home. Our dining room has been converted into a reading room and Gary Bukovnik exhibit, as the photo below attests. (Please ignore the gates in the photo, which we use for our dog training!)
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| Our converted dining room with Gary Bukovnik posters and one original, at far right! |
This
room is great for the reading I do. In effect, it combines my three
loves--reading, music, and art. I'm able to open the sliding glass door
behind the chair and see, hear, smell, and almost feel our wild
backyard garden. The smaller-framed pieces are San Francisco Symphony
and New Century Chamber Orchestra programs with admission tickets and
showing music selections that were played, and every program is signed
by a famous musician, including Joshua Bell, Lang Lang, Yuja Wang,
Anne-Sophie Mutter, and many others. I can sit in my chair, look at
Bukovnik's artwork, recall the performances, and read my books.
In
2018 we were fortunate enough to meet Gary Bukovnik. I had greatly admired his artwork for over 35
years. We were also fortunate
enough to purchase the Amaryllis II watercolor shown below, which fits
perfectly in our Bukovnik room. Gary is a really lovely person, and we
have talked at length about art over dinners in visits at his home in San Francisco and ours in Mountain View.
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| Amaryllis II, purchased in 2018. |
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| Gary and I at an exhibition of his artwork in 2019. |
Our home has no single art theme; it is an eclectic mix of our broad tastes in art. Our family room is filled with African art--abstract painting reproductions by Ethiopian artist, Wosene Kosrof, Shona sculptures from Zimbabwe, tribal masks from the Ivory Coast. Our kitchen, living room, and master bedroom are filled with watercolors (see Three Boats below) painted by our old friend, John Muir Reid, who passed away in 2016. In our stairwell we have hung posters of famous Monet works, and in our bathrooms are watercolors by Lary McKee. In my office I have another Bukovnik poster and a Raoul Dufy poster, entitled l'art et la musique.
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| Three Boats by John Muir Reid |
Art and music.
If you cannot surround yourself with things that you love to look at and
listen to, then your life is greatly diminished. Although art has
surrounded me for decades, however, it is still the little sister to Erato, the
muse of music, in my life.
Music
In
several of my essays, I have portrayed the ever-expanding importance of
music for me, from when I was a little child all the way up to
today. Rather than repeat the genesis and progression of music in my life, I
want to reflect on ways that music has impacted and changed me.
What music have I enjoyed? How do I rank the genres of music in importance to me? Let me give you a top-ten list of genres, with some representative favorites:
- Classical (Composers: Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Vaughn-Williams, Mendelssohn, Bach; Performers: Yo Yo Ma, Hilary Hahn, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Yuja Wang, Artur Rubinstein, Joshua Bell, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg)
- Acoustic/Folk (Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Thom Bishop, Dan Fogelberg, Jim Croce, Paul Simon, Laura Nyro, Karla Bonoff, Donovan, Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, Janis Ian)
- Country-rock (The Eagles, Pure Prairie League, Poco, Jonathan Edwards, Linda Ronstadt)
- Contemporary jazz (Jean-Luc Ponty, Andy Narell, Keiko Matsui, Marion Meadows)
- Big-band classics (Henry Mancini, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, the Dorsey brothers)
- Rock and roll (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, Steve Winwood, Fleetwood Mac)
- Bluegrass (Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Ricky Skaggs)
- 1940's pop (Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Jo Stafford)
- Disco and contemporary pop (The Bee Gees, Boz Scaggs, Al Jarreau, Michael Jackson, Basia)
- Motown (Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson, The Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas)
Some genres made my "honorable mention" list--show tunes, rhythm and blues, traditional jazz, reggae, while there are many genres I never really enjoyed--country, hard rock, heavy metal, rap, electronic, soul, gospel, African.
How much music is in my life? If I am not sleeping,
reading, watching TV, or walking my dog, music is there almost all the time. In my car I listen to stations of classical, contemporary
jazz, Beatles, 1940's pop, and bluegrass music. While I work on these
personal essays on my laptop, I listen to either of two phenomenal
stations from Switzerland--Radio Swiss Jazz or Radio Swiss Classic. On
the former station, I hear a lot of jazz from Europe which you'd never
hear on U.S. stations. Last year I organized my vinyl record
collection, which is mostly classical, acoustic folk, and rock and roll,
and I received a Bluetooth turntable for Christmas. There is music in
every room of the house if I want it.
In the years I worked
at software companies, I rarely listened to music except when I was
driving or exercising. I loved jogging to the music of Jean-Luc Ponty's
jazz violin or Andy Narell's steel pans, because each of their pieces
was seven or eight minutes long--energizing and hypnotic.
And, of course, I've played music on my guitars, off and on, since I was 13 years old. I have a piano, violin, ukulele, mandolin, and two recorders, none of which I can play but always have available for friends, should they feel the need. If I am not playing or listening to music, I am usually humming a tune or thinking about a piece. I also love reading biographies of musicians and songwriters. Music is everywhere in my life.
Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, I was usually occupied in writing songs. With friends or alone, I went to hundreds of concerts of one form or another--held in concert halls, clubs, coffeehouses, dorms, and basements. Early rock and roll and big band sounds of the 1950's awoke my interest in music, and folk music and rock and roll of the 1960's provided the fertile ground from which my deep love and attachment to music grew. The 1970's fostered my conversion to country-rock, bluegrass, and disco pop. Then in the 1980's I became very much devoted to classical music, and in the 1990's I discovered many great contemporary jazz musicians. Since 2000 my tastes have been varied and ever-changing, although classical music remains my bedrock.
I'll mention ten epiphanies in my music
appreciation history--ten pieces of music that rocked my world and set
me off in new, devoted directions. These pieces are described in
chronological order, according to when I first heard them.
Peter Gunn. The very first music that caught my attention was Henry Mancini's big band jazz sound from the TV show, Peter Gunn.
The show only appeared for three seasons, 1958-1961, but my dad and I
watched it every week. Those were the days when new music was composed
for each episode, and I loved all of what I heard. It was the
show's theme song that I first loved, and then it became the first album
I owned. I still thrill to that tune, more than 60 years since its
first appearance. Mancini's band was an all-star cast of great jazz
musicians, including Plas Johnson and Ted Nash. But one of my favorite
bits of music trivia is the name of the piano player on Peter Gunn--Curly
Williams, later to be known simply as John Williams, who composed
scores for many of the Lucas and Spielberg movies, including Star Wars.
Mancini recorded over 90 albums in his lifetime, including dozens of
movie scores. I saw him and his big band in concert while attending the
University of Illinois.
She Loves You.
The music world was changed when the Beatles first hit America, and the
song that did it for me was "She Loves You." It was a new brand of
rock and roll--one that featured tight, but non-standard harmonies, a
pioneering drumming style, and raw, high energy that they could
duplicate in live performances. The Beatles' music, played by four
musical geniuses, in my opinion, was a generation beyond the 1950's
skiffle and rock and roll bands we were familiar with. When I hear this
song on the radio, I always turn up the volume. While I never saw The
Beatles in concert, I did see Paul McCartney and Wings in the early
1990's.
For What It's Worth.
In the fall of 1966, a new band called Buffalo Springfield released a
song that would be considered a groundbreaking piece in the folk-rock
genre. The group featured two young lead guitarists, Stephen Stills and
Neil Young, along with singer/guitarist Richie Furay, who later
co-founded Poco. The mix of sounds on "For What It's Worth" was
revolutionary, with a lead vocal and electric guitar on one channel, and
an acoustic guitar, electric bass, drums, harmony vocals, and hand
claps on the other. I was thoroughly enthralled by how well the
electric guitar (with alternating two-note harmonics played by Young)
and acoustic guitar (played by Stills) blended to produce such a new,
fresh sound. With its anti-war lyrics and call to unite, the song
became an anthem for my generation of young people. I never saw Buffalo
Springfield in concert, but I've seen Stephen Stills and Neil Young a
couple times with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
Canadian Railroad Trilogy. Although much of the mid-1960's brought album after album of folk music into my life, Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" was the first song that really got me interested in playing 12-string guitar. I first heard it in 1967, three years before I bought my Martin 12-string, and it remained my favorite acoustic guitar song for years. On Lightfoot's second album, the piece was composed to commemorate the Canadian Centennial. It was almost 6-1/2 minutes long and featured gorgeous lyrics and tempo changes. I learned the song and played it many times on stage. Not only have I seen Lightfoot in concert six times, but I met him in 1970. (See my Twelve Stories essay!)
The Actress and The Artist.
Chances are you've never heard of this song, for it was never released
on a major recording, but only on a coffeehouse record. The Actress and The Artist
was the first original song I heard Dan Fogelberg sing, and I was
sitting about ten feet from him when he sang it on the Red Herring
Coffeehouse stage at the age of eighteen, in 1969. It redefined what I
thought was possible in writing and singing personal songs. With his
clear, high voice, excellent guitar and piano playing, and incisive,
poetic lyrics, he went on to a long career of producing beautiful
songs. Dan and I were good friends. I not only saw him perform dozens
of times, but I also played with him on stage often. (See my story
about Dan Fogelberg in Meetings With Remarkable People.)
Desperado.
By the early 1970's, country-rock music was emerging into the
mainstream, led by The Eagles. I first really noticed the group after
Linda Ronstadt recorded their song, "Desperado," in 1973, which was the
same year their album of the same name was released. I loved both
versions of the song, which I long thought of as having the most
perfectly written lyrics of any song I'd heard. The Eagles' version was a sheer production
masterpiece, perfectly sung by Don Henley, with an ever-building mix of
instruments and voices. The gradual use of piano (0:00), lead vocal
(0:19) strings (0:55), low background voices (1:27), drums (1:58), high
background voices (2:01) and second harmony vocal (2:30) showed a
restraint and attention to detail so rare with groups in that era.
After The Beatles disbanded, The Eagles arguably took over the top slot
in the mid-1970's. I learned the tune and played it for friends, and it
is one of my favorite songs still. I've seen The Eagles twice in
concert. The last time, in 2014, was my all-time favorite concert of
any type, ever! I saw them during their "History of the Eagles" tour.
Beethoven's Fifth.
To date I have been to 362 classical music concerts at Davies Symphony
Hall in San Francisco, but it was my very first concert that sold me on
the genre, when I heard (witnessed!) Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It was
the only time in those 362 concerts when I sat in the balcony looking
directly at the conductor, who was Edo de Waart. Of course, everyone
has heard the first four notes of that famous piece, but the entire
symphony is overwhelming, especially the fourth movement. In the
following months I bought albums of classical music by Grieg,
Mendelssohn, Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Vivaldi. I continued
attending classical music concerts and had season tickets to San Francisco
Symphony for the next 37 years. I have
heard Beethoven's Fifth Symphony performed in concert six times.
Chocolate Fog.
My radio at work in the 1980's was usually tuned to a contemporary jazz
station in San Francisco. The music was pleasant and interesting
without being too distracting. One day in 1987, I heard a piece that
captured my attention right away. It was Chocolate Fog by Andy Narell. I went out and bought the CD in the next couple days. Narell's album, The Hammer,
is filled with six great Caribbean-influenced tunes he composed. He
learned to play steel pans growing up in New York City and then played
jazz piano at U.C. Berkeley. I've seen him in concert several times.
He provides the highest energy and happiest feelings on his songs, which
are mostly instrumentals. To me, he is one of the best contemporary
jazz musicians.
Time and Tide. In the same year I discovered Andy Narell, I heard a young Polish singer named Basia Trzetrzelewska for the first time and immediately went out to buy her debut CD, Time and Tide.
It was the hit song by that name which made her an instant sensation in
the music world. The album was produced by her fellow-member of the
Matt Bianco group, Danny White. For years I'd followed Matt Bianco, a
group from England that did Latin jazz. Basia's songs were catchy,
high-energy, filled with Latin rhythms, and extremely well-produced.
But really, I was most amazed by her voice. The vocals on the Time and Tide album are extraordinary, and all of them
were done by Basia! She learned English by listening to Aretha
Franklin albums, and you can hear a slight Eastern European accent in
some songs. I think Basia has one of the top five female voices I've
heard in my lifetime. And, yes, I did get to see a live Basia concert
in S.F. years later, and it was incredible! The real significance of Time and Tide
is that it exposed me to some of the pop music played in Europe and
Brazil. It led to another favorite singer of mine, Marisa Monte.
Over the Rainbow. I'd always thought of Over The Rainbow
as a unique, whimsical song sung by a 16-year-old girl or a 1000-pound
man playing ukulele--until I heard Eva Cassidy cover it. Her recording
of the song, which was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg in 1939,
was released five years after she died at the age of 33 in 1996. I
first heard her version in 2002, and at that moment it became my
favorite song, never to be topped. With a range of at least three and a
half octaves, her interpretation and solo-guitar arrangement of the
song exceeds all other versions. Only one video recording exists of Eva
Cassidy, from a gig at Blues Alley in Washington D.C. ten months before
she died. I watch the video of Over the Rainbow several times a
year, and I'm still amazed by it. Hearing her rendition made me
realize that a good song can be turned into a truly great song with the
right interpretation and performance. Spend a few minutes listening to
Eva Cassidy's version on YouTube, and listen to the whole song. See if
you aren't blown away at the 3:58 mark!
Of these ten pieces, it occurs to me that I've heard eight of them performed live in concert by the composers. Beethoven was long gone, of course, and I've only heard Over The Rainbow covered by other singers in concert. Each of these pieces awoke a love in me for a different genre or sub-genre of music, including big band jazz, folk rock, Canadian folk, rock and roll, country rock, contemporary jazz, classical, and show tunes.
As varied as my tastes have been in music, its presence has served even more purposes in my life. I've listened to music for entertainment, comfort, inspiration, discovery, instruction, reminiscence, and background filler. When I am happy and filled with energy, I tune in bluegrass, contemporary jazz, or rock and roll. I can listen to the Beatles channel on Sirius XM for hours. When I'm contemplative or serious-minded, I'll listen to classical or folk. When I'm feeling nostalgic, I'll switch to a 1940's pop, big band, or disco station. I have known so many singer/songwriters that I can often pull out an album made by one of my friends when I'm missing them!
Music fills the gaps in my life. As I think over what I'm going to write for these personal essays, I'm almost always listening to music. When I'm in my car, music is playing most of the time. When I'm cooking a Chinese or Italian dish (which is about the only cooking I do), I'll listen to a jazz station in the kitchen. When I record specials on television, they are almost always music-related--interviews, concerts, documentaries. I'm certainly not unique in how music pervades my life, but I have probably put more thought into how music has crept into every single aspect of living.
Books
How many books have you read in your lifetime? Not long ago someone asked me that question, and I tried to give an intelligent estimate, after much thought. I read a lot as a teenager and in my twenties, but I only still have about a third of those books. I read little during my thirties, but I became an avid reader again when I turned forty, and I haven't curbed that addiction.
In my Puzzles, Games, and Mysteries essay, I tell why I love reading mysteries, so I won't repeat that discussion, except to say that I still own over 400 mystery books, and that number is growing each month. I have a couple hundred other books, mostly "serious" classics, books on philosophy, music biographies, and "self-help" books. I belong to a two-person book club with close friend, Peter Panfili, and we finish about fifteen books a year now.
It's reasonable to estimate that I've read between 900 and 1,000 books in my life, which was a real revelation to me. I currently try to read five books a month--sixty books a year--so if I maintain that pace for another fifteen years, I will have read another 900 books! So, as I see it, I'm only half done.
Along with art and music, books are part of my "triple helix" of life. I could not do without books. I only read hard-copy (soft- and hard-cover) books, not e-books. I love the feel, the smell, the weight, the design of those books. I love supporting my local bookstore, but I also peruse the internet for hard-to-find mysteries. I have located new copies of out-of-print paperbacks from many different states around the country--little bookshops in little towns.
There is nothing so wonderful to me as opening a new book to read. I'm careful not to crack the spine or fold the pages, caring for it as if it were a living creature. I read the publishing history, the introduction (if it has one), and then dive into the first chapter. I must have fifty bookmarks, so I'll grab one of them for the new book.
When I retired in 2015, I suggested to my wife that we switch the furniture between our living room and dining room, which are connected. We almost never sat in our living room, and our table and chairs always seemed a little cramped in the dining room, so we switched them. In addition to having a spacious dining room now, I use the old dining room space as my reading room! You can see a photo of that room in the Art essay.
I used to write notes in all my books, but now I only use a pen to correct typos. I just can't resist fixing a typo, as if it allows the book to breathe more easily. Ahhhh!
Now I read every day. Why do we read books? We read for entertainment, distraction, comfort, filling time, knowledge, inspiration, therapy, personal development. One of the few comments that makes me speechless is when someone says, "I can't find anything good to read." Hmm. Let me suggest a hundred or so titles for you. If I get to the end of a day and haven't read anything yet, I feel cheated. That's not supposed to happen!
I'd like to offer ten of my favorite books, just as I have written in a different essay about ten epiphanies I've experienced with pieces of music. These ten books, whittled down from a mental list of over fifty, hold a special place for me, because they opened new worlds--as a new piece of music or work of art might expose a new genre. I've read some of these books multiple times; they're so irresistibly good. They are presented in the approximate order in which I read them.
(I should clarify that many books from my childhood, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, were read to me, not by me. They were very important in my development, but I never owned them, and so they don't appear on this list.)
Let's see what's on this shelf....
The Complete Sherlock Holmes. As I mentioned in my Puzzles, Games, and Mysteries essay, I was given this book when I was very young. Over 1,100 pages long, it contains every story Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote about the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Although I received the volume in 1962, my uncle may have given me a book he'd had for many years, for the last copyright date in it is 1930. The pages are long, and the print is small, so I struggled through the entire book. It was my first taste of adult mystery stories, since I'd only read Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries before diving into Sherlock's adventures. Although I only realized it many years later, it was also my first exposure to deductive versus inductive reasoning, which was critical in my math training. Mysteries with deductive solutions are by far more common, but Doyle could write both types very well. Inductive reasoning is where clues are given and you induce that a crime will be (or has been) committed, without knowing the crime. This book provided hundreds of hours of joy for a little boy and teenager.
The Temple Of Gold. William Goldman is more famous for his screenplays ("All The President's Men," "Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid") than he is for his novels, but I read several of the latter when I was a teenager. "The Temple Of Gold" was his first novel, written right after he got out of college. It's a story about growing up, written for young people growing up. My great friend, Paul Anderson (see his profile in Meetings With Remarkable People), turned me on to writers like Goldman and Evan Hunter. They wrote books that were easy to read, filled with "real life" issues, and not mysteries!
Ernest Hemingway - The Short Stories (the first 49 stories). I read several of these stories in a college English course in 1968-69. Taught by Paul Friedman (see his profile in Meetings With Remarkable People), his course brought the magic of short stories alive for me. I've read this book three times. Stories like "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Big Two-Hearted River, Parts 1 and 2," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "The End of Something" remain in my list of all-time favorite short stories. This book got me interested in Hemingway, who remains my favorite writer to this day.
Crime And Punishment. Of all the Russian novels I've read, Fyodor Dostoevsky's masterpiece is my favorite. Russian novels aren't generally easy to read; my 1969 edition of this book is over 550 pages long, but I've read it twice--for two different college courses. It is Raskolnikov's character development that distinguishes this book for me. Dostoevsky paints a searing portrait of a young man who commits murder and can't escape his guilt. I forget the names of characters--even main characters--from most of the books I read, but I've never forgotten the name of Raskolnikov.
Zen In The Art Of Archery. I discovered this 81-page book in about 1990, and I forget who brought it to my attention. German philosopher Eugen Herrigel wrote it in 1948. It is the one book I try to read every 8-10 years. Although it was far from being the first book I read on philosophy, it was my first encounter with Zen philosophy. It is written so beautifully that one can actually understand Zen as it pertains to any art form. I get impatient with books on philosophy, but this book slowed me down enough to think. In the introduction by Daisetz T. Suzuki, a Japanese-American philosopher and monk, he writes, "In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer opposing objects, but are one reality." If that appears to be too profound, imagine shooting an arrow and hitting the bullseye while blindfolded. This is the story of Herrigel's journey from novice archer to that degree of mastery.
The Nine Tailors. Dorothy Sayers' "finest literary achievement" (NYT, 1957) was the first mystery I read when I returned to reading mysteries in 1988. Recommended by Gail Montgomery (who I profile in Meetings With Remarkable People), this book was written in 1934. Hailed by many as one of the greatest mysteries ever written, this book is about a bunch of bell ringers in a quiet English village, just my cup of tea on a quiet evening. After this book, I began reading mysteries non-stop as nighttime fare, and I haven't stopped.
This Wheel's On Fire. Of all the music-related biographies I've read, this one's the best. Written by Levon Helm, drummer in The Band for nine years, this is a fascinating tale of a band's birth, reign, and demise. Originally Bob Dylan's studio band, the group first became nationally popular in 1968, and I fell in love with their sound. All of the five members were multi-instrumentalists, and four of them sang vocals, making them perhaps the most versatile country-rock band that ever performed. If you're a music lover, this is one of the best books you'll ever find.
Sense And Sensibility. I was almost 70 years old when I read my first Jane Austen novel, but it immediately became one of my favorite books ever. Published in 1811 anonymously (written "By A Lady") , "Sense And Sensibility" tells the story of the Dashwood sisters. It's a well-paced, romantic drama, which is not uncommon in English literature. What surprised me was the beautiful writing. One might argue that no writer ever used the English language so exquisitely as Jane Austen. This is not considered Austen's best book, but it is my favorite book of hers because it was the first one I read. The edition I have was published in 1902 and is illustrated by Hugh Thomson, so it is a gem in many ways.
The Woman Who Smashed Codes. This is the biography of Elizebeth (not "Elizabeth") Smith Friedman, "an unsung heroine who used her genius to hunt Nazi spies, steal enemy secrets during both world wars, and help invent a powerful new science that shaped the course of history," as the book's synopsis says. Written by journalist Jason Fagone, it's a math book and an adventure book and a biography wrapped into one. Some of the code-breaking descriptions may be a bit obtuse for a non-math person, but it's still an amazing book. I've read several math-related books; this is the best one.
...and Honorable Mention. There are many, many books which deserve "honorable mention" on my list of ten favorite books. Here is a list of fifteen other books and their authors, in no particular order, which I would categorize as “favorites” in my literary conversations:
- Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
- The Remains Of The Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe
- A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
- The Sound And The Fury - William Faulkner
- Fermat's Enigma - Simon Singh
- The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll
- Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
- Dubliners - James Joyce (a collection of 15 short stories)
- Emma - Jane Austen
- My Antonia - Willa Cather
- The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- O Jerusalem! - Laurie King
- Daughter Of Time - Josephine Tey
Although Anthony Powell's opus A Dance To The Music Of Time would, as a whole, be in my top ten favorites list, I omit it because it is twelve separate novels, none of which makes the distinguished books cut.
Creativity
I
was not a very creative child. If I had an art project or English
essay to write, I would copy ideas, not create and develop new ones.
When I began playing guitar in my mid-teens, I sang other people's
songs, not ever attempting to write my own. The closest thing to being
creative was all the games that my sister and I would make up to
play. That began to change during the summer before my senior year in
high school, when I wrote a letter to a casual friend, Leonard Almquist,
and found him sitting on my front lawn the next night, wanting to
talk. We drove to the highest point in Rockford--a modest hill called
Twin Sisters--sat down and talked for a couple hours. He told me he was
reading a lot of poetry and recited a few poems.
I had never
paid attention to poetry before, but I began buying some poetry books
and even writing my own adolescent poems. They were probably dreadful,
and they were certainly not for anyone to read, but it was my first conscious attempt at
being creative. Later in high school, I became the news editor of our
newspaper, so I dipped my toes into the world of design, since I was in
charge of two of the paper's eight pages. As the school year went on, and
with the immense help of assistant news editor, Jill Meyer, the designs
got better and better. Writing news stories was not exactly a creative
endeavor, but we had to be creative in writing captions for photos,
writing concise headlines, and organizing the page formats in a
pleasing, eye-catching way. We honed our editing skills, often needing
to trim stories to fit newspaper columns.
In college my creativity began to pique. In addition to writing essays for my literature and philosophy classes, I began to write songs at the relatively late age of twenty. I'd played guitar, in front of no one, for about six years, so I simply combined the efforts of two things I'd done for a long time--writing poetry and playing guitar. Although I speak at exhaustive lengths in An Introduction To Songwriting on this point, I can summarize my history in songwriting as saying that I wrote some very good songs and some very mediocre ones.
With the exception of two or three songs that came very quickly, each songwriting effort took a long time to complete. In some cases it took years, when I'd set aside a song and return to it much later. It took 25 years to write Passenger, one of my best songs.
I struggled with all sorts of things while writing a song, maybe proving the point that I never should have thought I could be a commercially successful songwriter. My Life In The Middle Lane essay describes the task of writing a concept piece with another songwriter, but it also touches on some of my personal struggles in writing. I wanted every line, every word to be perfect, so my songs were often over-crafted. I don't know how long my close friend, Thom Bishop, spends on writing a song, but they have always flowed like conversations between two passionate, intimate people--a quality I attribute to songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot.
My best writing--and this really doesn't happen very often--is when I'm able to reach a relaxed, unencumbered state so the words just come out, where you almost try to not get in the way of the creative process. Some people call that "inspiration." It's easier for really good songwriters, who aren't overly concerned about craft and rhymes and tempos. I reached that inspired state in writing parts of songs much more often than in writing whole songs. I remember writing two lines from the last verse of Passenger, where the lines just jumped out in less than 15 seconds. The words "pan the dull horizon" is my tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni, who directed the movie, "The Passenger."
A few years after I began writing songs, I became interested in another art form--ceramics. I took my first ceramics class at a park district facility near my apartment, and I met Margaret Cardwell, who I profile in Meetings With Remarkable People. It was my first foray into visual arts. She spent a lot of time with me in demonstrating how to center clay and throw a pot, and we became quite good friends. She was one of the most creative people I've ever known. She was a master in ceramics, metal sculpture, and several different types of painting. It was with Margaret that I first began to consider the intersection between craft and imagination. "Okay, now that I can center this chunk of clay in twenty seconds with my eyes closed, what am I going to make?"
After
moving to California in 1976, I continued my ceramics with three or
four other teachers over the course of many years, and I learned a lot
from each person. I'd do ceramics for three years and then lay off for
five years or so. In about 1991, I took up another visual
art--stained-glass making. My essay entitled The Lamp talks
about that adventure. That effort was much more craft than imagination,
since I didn't create any of my own designs. My main goal was to do a
Tiffany lamp in my lifetime, and I did that. I picked out all the
glass, so there was design work in coordinating colors and markings in
the glass, but it didn't challenge my creative spirit. The lamp did
challenge my ability to focus and attention to detail, since it took 300
hours to finish.
My most creative endeavors, however, were in something entirely different--designing and writing computer database systems. Since most people don't know what that entails, they don't know what opportunities and challenges arise in designing those systems. When you design custom software systems, the first thing you must do is gain a complete understanding of how a client runs their business. This involves defining all the entities, relationships, and rules for that business. Some consultants work in only one or two industries--an insurance specialist or an accounting expert, for instance. At our company, Quartet Systems, we worked in dozens of industries, from television programming to asbestos litigation, from cemetery management to credit reporting, from loan processing to investment management, from recycling to road repair to property taxes. In fact, we worked in almost every industry I can think of except medical billing. That was a can of worms we didn't want to touch.
As a systems analyst in a small company, you learn to do everything with and for the users of your software. You write requirements documents, design and implement physical database structures, write programs for data entry screens, reports, and updates, install the software, write training documents, do user training, provide support, and fix problems when they arise. Each task requires different creative methods and abilities. A data entry screen might require 500 design decisions--as intricate as a printed circuit board. Each single field on a data entry screen might have 200 separate "properties" that have to be set correctly to work.
When a software program (a screen, a report, or a non-visual update) finally worked, I felt like an artist completing a painting or a songwriter finishing a song. My best moments as a systems analyst were my most creative moments, when I solved problems to make something work, look good, and please the client. That's what kept me going for 42 years in my career, and I was really good at coming up with elegant solutions to hard problems. Donald Knuth, a famous computer science professor at Stanford University, made this insightful statement about the type of work we did: "Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty."
A final word about the creative process in designing computer programs--although much of the work is solo, it can be like an intricate, intellectual dance with others, when you get together with people to solve really tricky problems. Those collaborations were the most fun in all my creative life.
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